Page 1 of Spellbound
Prologue
“Going so soon? I wouldn’t hear of it. Why, my little party’s just beginning.”
~The Wicked Witch,The Wizard of Oz
The Blue Ridge Mountains are incredibly old. Older than any mountains in America or even the world—older than the rings of Saturn. They’ve stood for millions and millions of years and might stand for millions more. They wear their immense age with grace and majesty and cover their age-marks with a haze that looks like a soft, blue veil.
I dreamed that I was back there again, standing outside the old home of the Cromwell family. Maybe it wasn’t a dream, after all, but a nightmare, come to think of it, because the walls of the Cromwell house are blackened now; the roof is gone, and only the ruins of the house remain standing. And I’d never wanted to go there again.
But in my dream, ghostly faces peered out of the pieces of the old, wavy glass that somehow clung stubbornly to a few of the windowpanes here and there. Ghosts flitted under the trees as well, peeking out at me from behind the lacy skirts of the Spruce trees that lined what was left of driveway, or drifting past me through the trees and into the woods beyond. I wasn’t surprised to see them, because I already knew that the ghosts of Cromwell house were very real.
In the deep woods surrounding the old house, whenever you heard someone call your name or heard whistles and mournful sounds, like humming or moaning, you were warned never toanswer or call back. They might be all that’s left of some poor soul who had died here, a long time ago, starved or lost or frozen or killed by animals or some other kind of wild and savage thing. They could be the spirits of dead soldiers, frightened and alone and angry that their lives had been cut short, or an indigenous person, bitter about their homes being invaded and stolen from them. Or a young woman, barely out of her teens, dead in childbirth and mourning for the child she never got to raise. Spirits like these can grieve endlessly for their losses, though in the end, it changes nothing, accomplishes nothing, helps nothing. Nevertheless, these souls create powerful and hungry ghosts.
Some of the ghosts who walk there are so old and have been there for so very long that they’ve forgotten their names and who they once were. They wait in dim, shadowy places and they’ve lost any scrap of the humanity they once had. All that’s left is seething malice and envy toward the living, and they take every opportunity to feed on any living energy they can find. They are consumed by greed and hatred and spite. They tend to linger in the places where they died, though they could wander for miles, invisible during the daylight hours and appearing mostly at night. They’re especially attracted to practitioners of magic or witchcraft, from whom powerful, elemental energy might be extracted. They don’t stay long, unless they find a living source to feed from. Then they might try to attach themselves, and feed until their victim is drained completely dry.
Suddenly, in the way of dreams, I became aware that Ben was standing beside me. He took my hand, and I pulled strength from him and from the etheric flow that ran so strongly through him. “It’s time to come home now,” he said, tugging me gently away. “Time to come back to me. There’s danger here.”
“Yes, I need to go. Away from all these ghosts.”
He slipped his warm arm around me, taking away some of the chill as he drew me away. “No,” he said. “No, don’t give them a name. We don’t know what they are yet.”
Chapter One
"If you hear something, no, you didn't....sit your ass down and leave it alone. It’s not your business, and you can't do anything about it anyway.”
~Appalachian Folklore
Asher MacGregor
I woke up on the morning of our journey to western North Carolina, feeling anxious and uneasy. That wasn’t anything new for me, actually—my ex-boyfriend had once told me I was only one raw nerve away from a total nervous collapse, and I was afraid that was probably true.
But in my defense, I hated road trips, even if this was only a fairly short one. Actually, I hated travel in general. And what was worse than all that was being rushed, which I now was because I’d overslept, and my grandma, who was driving us, would me there any minute to pick me up. We were taking her big 2023 Chevy Suburban on the trip up to Brevard, N.C., a town only about thirty-five miles or so from Asheville.
I hadn’t been to that area since I was a teenager, but that’s where we were fucking going. I had agreed to do this, damn it, and I just needed to get over myself and get on with it. Arrangements had been made, my small amount of household goods had already been shipped, and money had changed hands for a lease on a little guest cottage I was going to occupy up there for the next six months to a year. I told myself again that it would be fine. I told myself it would all work out and I’d begladthat I agreed to do this—for the next six months to a year.I told myself a lot of crap that I never truly believed.
I got weak for a few seconds at the thought of it, holding onto the kitchen counter to steady myself. Six months to a fucking year was how long my doctor said it could take for me to recover fully from my accident and get back to full strength. It was far too late to back out of this deal now—though I would have liked nothing better. If I kept telling myself getting out of it was not an option, then maybe I could convince myself to just get on with it and fuck the premonitions of disaster I had and the idea that something major was waiting for me in North Carolina. Something was either going to go badly wrong there or maybe even change my life. Whether or not that was a good thing remained to be seen.
But fuck all that shit. I could do this.
After all, it wasn’t unusual to be apprehensive about an imminent journey that had such an uncertain outcome. That’s what my therapist told me anyway the last time we’d had a session, and I believed her. Well, you know, more or less…
But I still needed one of my pills to take the edge off. Maybe two. I limped into the kitchen to get a glass of water to take them with and then decided maybe I should go ahead and take three while I was at it. It couldn’t hurt. They were mild, and it was going to be a long day after all and a long ride to North Carolina. I was rinsing the glass and putting it in the rack when I heard my grandma’s big ole SUV pull up in the driveway.
She and I were leaving for an extended stay at the home of her younger sister, Rosalyn. Or rather, I’d be in the cottage, and my grandma would be staying in the house with her sister, as the guest cottage was really too small for both of us.
They’d always been close, but when Rosalyn’s husband had died a few years ago after a long, lingering illness, it had brought them even closer together. We had arranged for me to lease the cottage on Rosalyn’s property for the next however long—I refused to repeat what my grandma and the doctor kept saying—at a greatly reduced rate while I concentrated on recovering from an accident that had given me a serious concussion and required me to have surgery for fractures of both my tibia and fibula in my left leg. It was every bit as painful as it sounded.
And gruesome, because after my fall, my tibia bone snapped clean in two and half of it came poking right out of my leg. It looked like half anyway, though I admit I didn’t take a good long look at it. I’d passed out right away, in fact, as soon as I saw all the blood and the white bone that should never have seen the light of day. It was justwrong. They’d had to put in pins and screws, as well as putting me in a cast, and it had been a really long and painful three and a half months since the fall.
Rosalyn had insisted she didn’t want any rent for the cottage, but I didn’t like the sound of that and had insisted she take some money anyway. I had a little in savings and my grandma had told me she would chip in and help too. Like I said, she’d planned to stay at her sister’s house and give me the privacy and quiet I’d need to hopefully work on my master’s thesis while I was there. Let’s just say, the project hadn’t been going well so far.
I was mostly recovered from my accident, but I’d got an infection after surgery, as the icing on the cake, which set me back even more. The infection had cleared up, but the pain remained, along with a troubling, lingering weakness in my leg. I also had migraines now too, which was just another little gift that just kept on giving, because I’d sustained a concussion that day, and though I’d never had migraine headaches before, I had them now. In fucking spades. And I can’t say I’d recommend them even for my worst enemy. I was walking with a cane now too, like a ninety-year-old man.
My frequent absences from my job as a Teaching Assistant at my college had been mainly due to the migraines and were the main reason I’d had to give it up. Actually, the decision wastaken out of my hands when they decided they couldn’t hold the position open for me any longer. So, I planned to use the next six months (or so) that stretched out ahead of me to work hard on my recovery and hopefully complete my master’s thesis at the same time.
Said thesis was far from being done, because I was behind on that too. I figured I could confer with my advisor by video calls if and when I needed to, and she had agreed to that plan. It would also give my grandma a chance to spend time with her sister. Rosalyn had recently undergone treatment for an aggressive form of breast cancer, and she had only just finished her treatments the previous month.
Thankfully, the cancer had been discovered extremely early, due to an incredibly luckily-timed mammogram, and she’d come successfully through a round of chemo and radiation and was doing pretty well now. The thing was, she’d had cancer once before—five years earlier. Back then the cancer had been in her lungs, but again, it was caught really early. After intense chemo and radiation therapy, it had finally gone into remission, but there was some concern that this latest cancer might be related or meant that she was no longer really in remission after all. I’m probably messing up the details, and I’m sure there was more to it than that, but that was the general gist. My grandma had told me all about it—at some length—but she tended to ramble a little, and sometimes I tuned her out.
